Embodiments of the inventive subject matter generally relate to the field of computer communications, and, more particularly, to broadcast and unicast communication between non-coherent processors using coherent address operations.
For the purposes of doing real-time server monitoring (thermals, power, performance, etc.), intelligent on-chip micro-controllers can be implemented into a multi-core processor chip that is part of a multi-chip symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) system so that localized monitoring of a given chip can occur. SMP systems typically have an interconnect (referred to as a “fabric”) that connects the main processing cores and caches together in a memory coherent manner. Participation in the cache coherent protocols on such a fabric is expensive in the silicon resource needed for an otherwise small micro-controller. In a addition, a typical premise of a coherent fabric is to track the movement of memory blocks between the attached caches. A coherent typically doesn't support the concept of broadcasting data elements from one location to many in that fabric